TO THE READERS.

arts, and thus arrive at the highest peak, supported by reasons resting on a firmer foundation. There is no need for me to extol its praises more highly, since its followers have already adorned it with sufficiently lofty praises to make it pleasing to their auditors for further investigation. I believe its use and utilities are not unknown to you. For it has brought no small light to natural science, it has illustrated and produced very many arts, it demonstrates daily a more accurate method to them for attaining a prefixed goal more quickly, and it completes in short order those things without which human life could not exist without harm. Therefore, snatched by admiration of it, I fell into love with it, and into investigating and scrutinizing the mysteries so much celebrated by various authors. But who could fully overthrow nature, which is abstruse and surrounded by many hiding places, when it often deludes us with so many torrents, so many envelopes, so many complexities, and just as many labyrinths, and renders our efforts fruitless? So that some Theseus might need the thread of Ariadne to survey all these things and return a victor. Mysteries written down by diverse people, but more often never explored by them; mysteries which, through the injuries of time and hostile insult, have been handed over to dark oblivion; mysteries which, by their vanity and impossibility, serve as a